35 



THE COURSE OE THE SOURIS. 



The Souris, or Mouse, or St. Pierre river, has a course of 

 some four hundred miles, and may be claimed as a Canadian 

 river, for though crossing the boundary line four times, and 

 having a large portion of its winding career in the Territory of 

 Dakota, in the United States, yet its source is in Wood Moun- 

 tain on Canadian soil, and its direction, of eighty or more miles 

 after, for the last time, crossing the boundary line is northward' 

 to the point where it empties into the Assiniboine. Along this 

 winding course are natural monuments, artificial fortifications, 

 and mounds, and the ruins of fur traders' forts of very great 

 interest, and they constitute for the work of our society, which 

 I venture to think has been of service, in its eight years' exis- 

 tence, in making known many features of our Northwest, a 

 field with virgin soil. Far up in the course of the Souris at 

 a point about 254 miles west of Red River, and some three and 

 a half miles north of the International boundary, is a most in- 

 teresting group of rocks standing out on the prairie, long 

 known from the most remarkable of them to the half-breed 

 hunters of the plans as 



LA ROCHE PERCEE. 



Here at the junction of a small tributary — "Short Creek" — 

 with the Souris river may be seen the fantastic shapes of worn 

 and weather-eaten gray sandstones, having the appearance of 

 ruined shrines. The best known — of which we have a photo- 

 graph taken by the boundary Commission — resembles the arch- 

 way of a Pharaonic temple. These vast rocks standing out — a 

 natural Stonehenge — on the open prairie have greatly impressed 

 the Indians, who regard the locality as sacred to the Manitou. 

 Upon the rocks are engraven the totems of many of the redmen 

 who have gone as devotees to this prairie shrine.. Human 

 figures, the horse, the elk, the buffalo, the sturgeon, the teepee, 

 the pelican, and the star are all to be found as commemorative 

 emblems. So great was the fame of this prairie wonder among 

 all Indian tribes that Capt. Palliser's expedition in August, 

 1857, struck southward from Fort Ellice some seventy or 

 eighty miles across the prairie for the sole purpose of observing 

 the grotesque forms of the "pierced rock." At this part of the 

 Souris on its banks are found the well-known 



COAL BEDS 



for which for years in the early settlement of the province the 

 Souris was chiefly known. It is a remarkable thing in any land 



